I was looking through the class blogroll for some inspiration and I came across Clayton Dang’s blog about Google+. In his blog, Clayton made made a very compelling case for some of google+’s features which are superior to Facebook’s. This example got me thinking about the reasons why consumer’s sometimes choose a seemingly inferior product. Finally, I realized that consumers don’t choose inferior products, they choose products which provide them with the greatest value even if that value is largely dependant on some overlooked or intangible factor, and not just the hard facts about a product. In the The case of Facebook and Google+, this fact or is each website’s user base. Since Facebook and Google+ are social networking sites the primary service which they provide to their users is to allow them to connect with their friends online. However, in order to provide this service, the site must actually have a person’s friends as users. This provides an instant barrier. Google+ could have the best website in the world, but if people cannot connect to their friends than google+ does not deliver any value to consumers. Another example of this was the Blackberry vs. Iphone debate at my highschool. Based on features and technology alone, the iphone was a better piece of equipment for a highschool student. Even so, everyone used blackberry’s. This was because when everyone had blackberry’s, everyone used bbm. This single and essentially redundant feature when placed beside texting was enough to defeat a better piece of technology. These two examples demonstrate that consumers often make choices based on intangible or underweighted factors with little regard for what product is objectively “better.”